


Just Beneath the Skin

by rainbowthreads



Category: All Elite Wrestling
Genre: Alcohol, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Blood, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, POV Second Person, Violence, Wrestling, hardcore wrestling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:13:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24037177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowthreads/pseuds/rainbowthreads
Summary: Just how much would be enough to quiet the monster inside you?
Kudos: 10





	Just Beneath the Skin

It should be enough, but it’s not. It never is. Stomping your bare feet into thumbtacks until your soles shine with silver and your flesh sings with pain and your blood oozes between your toes – that should be enough to quiet the monster within you.

But it’s not. _It never is._

You could wrap barbed wire around your own exposed heart and set the whole thing on fire and that fucker would still thirst for more.

Everything slips into unreality before your eyes as you limp away from the ring. The faces in the crowd melt, blending and blurring into monsters studded with eyes the same way your feet are studded with tacks, eyes that can see right through you. Their screams and jeers are muffled like you’re underwater. Your breath catches in your throat like you’re drowning.

When you finally get backstage, they want a medic to clean you up, but you refuse. You stagger into a shower and let the hot water soak the blood from your hair, burning in the nicks and cuts on your arms and back, and you sit on the floor and use your fingernails to pluck the tacks out one at a time.

Just beneath your skin, it twists and writhes. _This isn’t enough._

You could slam your head into the tiles until your skull breaks. Smash the mirror and dig the glass under your nails. Bite at your wrists hard enough to pull off the flesh. Would that leave it satisfied?

_No._

You towel off, get dressed, and go to the bar, just like you do after every show. You knock back beer after beer as though you could drown this thing inside you. As if. You know your demons learned to swim decades ago.

But the drunker you get, the more the twisting, gnawing hunger calms. The feeling grows sluggish, dormant, a sleeping giant still stretching the boundaries of your skin but no longer threatening to tear them open.

_For now._


End file.
